NAMM supposedly stands for the “National Association of Music Manufacturers.” It’s purportedly a trade show for music instruments and technology. But, for brief but glorious moments, “NAMM show” translates in English to “ridiculous musical stuff.” Just how ridiculous? We’re talking guitars made out of football helmets.

Just in case you think you might extract any respectability from this $299 novelty guitar, there’s more: interchangeable face masks. Multiple colors for matching your favorite team (you’ll have to provide the logos — guess they didn’t pony up for a license). A built-in speaker, just in case an amp looks too, you know, professional. And the pièce de résistance, football-shaped guitar picks.

Helmet Guitars

Any pride left? Well, how about filming a demo video playing this,(inexplicably) shirtless. Hint: do not tell, say, potential dates or job interviews “Last night, I took off my shirt and started totally wailing on my helmet guitar!” That could be interpreted in way too many ways, none of them not wrong.

Hey, at least Miesel Stringed Instruments doesn’t have any illusions. They promise the guitar “will have you rockin’ all the way from your rec room at home, college dorm, tailgate party, to the Super Bowl after party!”

Will you see anything this fun at CES? I don’t think so.

But if I sound in any way critical, it’s only because I think the Helmet Guitar can’t begin to compare with the same builder’s aquarium acoustic guitar (among others).

Tune in January 17-20 for live coverage from the NAMM show in Los Angeles, from the awesome to the awesomely strange. And stock up on donuts, because you may start craving them.

As if we’re not normally fantasizing about strange gear, electronics, t-shirts, software, and general oddities throughout most of the year, now is a special time when our thoughts turn to even more intricate rationalizations for buying great stuff for ourselves and our loved ones. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift, or just waiting until after various holidays to expand your studio, here are a few ideas. They read not only as a gift guide, but as a "Really Wonderful Things We’re Into" guide. And naturally, we don’t believe in throwaway consumption — readers on this site still avidly use Commodore 64s, after all. We’ve asked our contributors to come up with stuff they’ll treasure forever. Here are their favorites

Mike Una

Michael Una is an informant and writer for CDM on bent circuits, sound art, and electronic goodness; check out his interview last week with Beatrix*Jar and the results of the Circuit Bending Challenge.

Hip fashion for music geeks:

Moogs Not Missiles T-shirt, $20 from Etsy.com (above)

Synthi Blue Green T-shirt, $21.99 from Gear Addict @ Cafe Press

Bootsy Collins T-Shirts, $20.99 from rocktshirtspunk.com

The ways in which people can reimagine the beloved turntable seems boundless. We’ve seen bass guitar turntables, computer scratching visualizations, turntable-controlled vibrating chaise longues, and turntables embedded in tree trunks as art installations. Still, there’s more:

TurntablistPC is an ongoing art project coupling a vintage turntable with a vintage PC, creating a hybrid, record-playing server that can be controlled remotely by remote websites around the world. It’s the creation of artist Mogen Jacobsen, and it’s currently being exhibited as part of a show called Webscape at the Art Museum of West Sealand, Denmark. What? You’re not planning to pass through West Sealand this fall? The museum still wants your help: embed a piece of code, and visitors to your own website will trigger manipulations of the turntable based on geographic position.

TurntablistPC Project Page
The TurntablistPC spins again! [Networked Music Review, my new favorite source for artsy music tech!]

Thanks to our artist friend Michael Una for tipping us off. I’m not sure I’ll be building anything of this sort soon, but what I do like about it conceptually is that it returns playback devices — increasingly abstract and virtual in the age of the iPod — to the realm of mechanical instrument. I think we may see all sorts of strange, new, hybrid digital/mechanical instruments in the coming years.

Of course, if you can’t figure out how to turn a turntable into a hybrid server art installation, you can always just don your black vinyl jumpsuit and strap your turntable to your back. I think Numark’s idea here was to somehow promote their turntables, but to me, they may have stumbled onto a new, futuristic couture in which we wear heavy objects as fashion statements. And for whatever reason, I’m game! (People could, you know, come up to you … I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine sorta thing?)

Making_sound grabbed this shot and sent it to our Flickr group; thanks!

Daft Punk is on a mind-blowingly cool tour. Aside from, you know, being Daft Punk, they’ve assembled dazzling futuristic visuals, slick leather jumpsuits, and sophisticated, animated LED helmets.

What? You want to tour with LED helmets, too? It’s easy, outlined in a PDF by the creators. I can make the steps even more brief:

1. Cast your face and make a bust of the face and clay models of all the parts.
2. Modify a motorcycle helmet for the electronics.
3. Design your own LED display and controller board.
4. Glue in LEDs … one … at … a time … and connect three feet of wiring per LED.
5. Build another custom PC board for a control keypad on the armband. (Hey, step #3 was easy enough, right?)
6. Custom manufacture all the exterior plastic and finishing.
7. Paint

The best way to experience all of this is in person, naturally, but here’s a roundup of some terrific coverage.

Daft Punk Concert report and lots of technical details, via our friend Chris O’Shea / Pixelsumo (who points to all the details on the visuals and costumes)

Word of an Upcoming Daft Punk Movie, from our friend and CDM contributor Quantazelle (Liz McLean Knight)

Many, many, many Daft Punk videos on dailymotion.com

Brilliant black-and-white snaps backstage on Flickr from leather jumpsuit designer Hedi Slimane

Alien, futuristic action figures — because they can.

Gobs of videos of the pair in action:

So, a Reaktor tattoo seems a little painful and permanent? Just in time, Native Instruments this week has a line of new t-shirts, and they actually look really great, which is good — branded swag is usually way lame.

Native Wear (not as racy as it sounds) [Native Instruments]

The designer is MIG75, aka Berlin’s Adrian Theiner, confirming my suspicions that Berlin is full of cool people.

Speaking of branded swag, without revealing too much, CDM is working on the issue. After all, you don’t want to show up at a gig wearing a Native Instruments or Ableton shirt — dude, people will know your secret sauce. (Okay, they might know that anyway if I give into temptation and put a recognizable instance of Resonator or Beat Repeat or use a Reaktor granular effect on a track. Or they look at my screen. Or they know me.) But not having the t-shirt could make it easier to say, “That? Oh, that’s something I just programmed. From scratch. Actually, I built that computer. And that keyboard. Out of soy products.”

And yeah, I’d still like a t-shirt. I have to cover up my chest while the tattoo heals.

Cassette-tape DJ battles are just one of TradeMark G.’s retro, regressive, subversive musical creations. He also likes to put on glasses, a white lab coat, and interactive sewing thimble gloves, in order to produce illegal, copyright-crushing musical performances.

Many of the techno-gimmicks seen here on CDM are one-offs and prototypes. The Evolution Control Committee, by contrast, has been producing “illegal art”, often with the aid of technology, for some 20 years. They’ve been “culture jamming”, dropping Napster bombs (remember Napster?), infamously attracting the ire of CBS, and dressing up as giant pairs of trousers and cans of Parmesan cheese ever since. (I’m especially fond of the giant pants costumes.)

For the last few years, they’ve been perfecting the Thimbletron, a glove with sewing thimbles attached to a hacked M-Audio Oxygen8. (I always knew those Oxygen keyboards would be good for something.) The interface gives them newly-expanded powers of sample triggering. Happily, unlike Wired Magazine, they don’t overuse the term “mash-ups” to describe what they’re doing. Try, instead, “plagiarhythm” or “plunderphonics”: “In the world of The ECC’s music, Public Enemy duke it out with Herb Alpert while TV news anchor Dan Rather is the new frontman for AC/DC.”

Thimbletronic Energy Technology Page (video link at the top)

TradeMark will be performing with the Thimbletron at the Maker Faire, as well as running the cassette tape DJ battle we saw earlier:

Call for Cassette Jockeys @ Maker Faire, Cassette Tech Roundup

CDM (meaning me) will be at Maker Faire all week, sending as much coverage and causing as much havoc as possible. I’m hoping Dan Rather shows up.

More glove music controllers:

Controlling Music with DIY Interactive Gloves

Continuing in the spirit of cassette tapes, here are two more cassette items.

Cassettes that Hold Your Change

Completely useless, but somewhat amusing: Designboom’s Cassette Wallet recycles old cassette shells into zippered money holders. If you’re looking to get your retro chic on, they’re $43. Or, if you find some lame tapes as you’re rooting throw your collection for the Cassette Jockey Competition at Maker Faire, you can try to figure out how to recycle it into something like this and sell it for $43. Via the Spanish-language JP-Geek, Sweden’s English-language Fosfor, and a site you already know about.

Cassettes for Analog Resampling

In the domain of the musically functional, Roland from Munich wonders if cassette players with pitch control could be the perfect addition to a digital studio.

Just saw your post about cassette players and wanted to ask if you know of any old commercially-available players that allow you to set the playback speed manually (maybe some professional model?).

Could really use that for sampling since I am not a big fan of the digital algorithms available.

I’d love to hear some reader thoughts on this.

M-Audio may not spell the word “connective” / “conectiv” right, but they’re getting some very positive feedback from their new DJ line, including Torq (the DJing + vinyl control solution), Conectiv (the audio interface), and X-Session Pro DJ control surface. I’m hearing great comments here from readers, and there’s other word around the Interwebs. Some early bugs, as would be expected with a new product, but it sounds as though they’re getting effectively squashed. And with a US$99 version for beginners and affordable prices on the “pro” products, this stuff could catch on fast.

Here’s what looks like a great review in German, which comes conveniently two days before I have a doctoral German reading exam to take. Now I can study this, which is a great deal more fun:
M-Audio Conectiv & Torq Testbericht [Alex's Blog]

M-Audio are out on the road promoting their DJ stuff very heavily, too. First, they’ve toted the new kit to trade shows in Asia and Broadcast India (hey, I expect the Asian market will soon dwarf the North American and European markets). Second, they’re helping push Scarface: The Video Game. (Too bad; if they wanted to hit the coveted CDM market, they would have found some Zelda: Twilight Princess tie-in, but I digress.) And they’ve holding scratch competitions with Torq, as well, as seen here on YouTube. Computers, ending the age of turntablists? Quite the opposite, it would appear:

Video via Scratchworx, which also has a terrific hands-on report on new DJ gear from Music Live. (Not to be confused with the somewhat less-than-successful MusicPlayer Live from here in NY about a year ago.) And if you can’t get invited to an event with an M-Audio demo of the new stuff, here’s the next best thing — GearWire with the M-Audio demo:

M-Audio Torq Videos [GearWire, from Summer NAMM]

For more on Torq and Conectiv, see our earlier roundup of first impressions and resources; read through for comments with impressions from readers:

M-Audio Torq/Conectiv DJ Early Adopters Share Tips and Reviews

“Ah,” you say, “but what will I do after I’ve bought Torq and Conectiv, and I’m wildly rich and famous?” How about buy a $13,000 ring with a turntable on it?

_$13K TURNTABLE RING [DJ Amber, who is also a permanent fixture on Technorati]

Add that to our previously-covered collection of DJ/music-tech bling. Still waiting on the gold and diamond-encrusted Max/MSP jewelry, but I’m not giving up hope yet.

Your stupid, low-tech t-shirts. All they do is sit there. You can’t even hook them into a computer and control instruments live. Pathetic. John Malloy points us to a project by Dr. Richard Helmer, an engineer from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Belment, Australia. By embedding “textile motion sensors” (using conductive fibers, basically, so the fabric becomes a big set of resistors), you can play a real air guitar:

Air guitar T-shirt rocks for real [BBC News]
It’s not rocket science… it’s rockin’ science [CSIRO Article; site is a little slow, probably because of BBC traffic!]

The textile end is just half the equation; the team built custom software for interpreting gestures. It even maps to both right- and left-handed wearers, so us rightie elitists can’t continue to abuse the downtrodden lefties of the world.

Don’t like guitars? They’ve played tambourine and guiro, too.

For related projects, see CDM’s wearable tag.

Any CDM readers out there who have played with conductive textiles? (Come on, NYU ITP students, I know you’re reading.)

[tags]fashion, wearable, physical-computing, sensors, hardware, guitars, oddities[/tags]

Love your audio gear so much you wish you could wear it around your neck, but a loudspeaker on your throat would a) strangle you and b) make you look like too much of a dork to attend high-society functions? Complete Technique jewelers feels you.

From sterling silver turntable cartridges plated in gold with embedded cubic zirconia to tiny silver pendants of speakers, CT manages to say both bling and audio geek at once. (Prices hover at just over US$200 to start.) Their custom pieces are when things start to get really interesting, however. Via the always-hilarious Don’t Believe the Hype Beast, we learn they’ve created a custom pendant of the Akai MPC 3000 sampler for producer Hi-Tek.

Complete Technique Custom Audio Jewelry

For a real custom job, I’d like a tiny pendant that actually functions as an audio device. In the meantime, you can part yourself with your hard-earned cash for non-functional personal adornment, if you feel so moved. (Sadly, the engagement ring does not keep with the audio theme — I was imagining two lovely young synth geeks, bound together in their eternal love of each other and the Minimoog.)

Along these same lines, don’t forget the brilliant MIDI bracelets, pictured here, by producer - Chicago music scenester - electronic musician - jeweler Liz McLean Knight, aka Quantazelle. Anyone got more resources? We could have a whole audio technology lover’s Tiffany’s.

More photos after the break, including my favorite which has nothing to do with music.